>>4955027733 now. I actually skipped gen 6/7 because I'd moved to a new town/state and wasn't really playing games at all. Thought I'd start working out and going to school and going out. Eventually after about 3 years of all this I gravitated back towards gaming in my late 20s because I hate working out/it wasn't helping me with women even though I definitely got buffer, I couldn't make any irl friends or get people to engage me irl really at all when I tried, and failed my classes even with a tutor.
I know people hate sword and shield but I enjoyed it when I came back to gaming and it made a lot of things like breeding shinies way easier and I got deep into shiny hunting. There was some good quality of life changes. I also started buying pokemon cards again(and even playing the tcg online in the app). I can't really explain it but I just really like pokemon and realized this made me a lot happier collecting(as I'm just a collector of things in general) pokemon in game, cards, plush,etc than trying to force what would be considered a normal life. and even though the games are flawed I still find enjoyment in them and the characters. I started reading Adventures and some of the other manga again and the different variety of Pokemon comics really shows how much potential for worldbuilding the franchise has that otherwise kinda gets wasted. Detective Pikachu was also a pretty good motivator. I actually really enjoyed that movie aside from the whole dumbass stuff at the end with the police chief from hot fuzz transferring his consciousness into mewtwo.
Pokemon has a lot of different ways of experiencing other than just playing the mainline games over and over and I think that's really helped. That and the 2 generation break I took.
